While the German element in Ohio which, half a century ago, made such cities as Cincinnati centers of Teutonic kultur, is still the most important numerically, it is outnumbered by the Poles, Czechoslovaks, Hungarians, Yugoslavs, Lithuanians, and the like, if they are taken together. The easy access across the Great Lakes has given Ohio, like her sister States, an important Canadian element.
Indiana, most American of States in its early period, still makes an excellent showing, with nearly 85 per cent of its population native white of native parentage. In the interchange of inhabitants it still continues, as it did in the days of its founding, to draw an important Southern element from across the Ohio River. The State of Ohio does the same. The population still tends to move westward, not eastward, from Indiana, taking with it some of the best of American family lines and the purest of American traditions.
The half million of foreign stock within the borders of the State are at least half Nordic. No single group of the Slavs or Mediterraneans is represented heavily, although there are a few of all those national elements.
The people of Indiana deserve recognition for the way they have preserved their heritage. It is no accident that the "Indiana school" of writers has long sounded the authentic American note in literature, in striking contrast to the decadent tone of the output in some of the Atlantic Coast centers where the dominant element is quite un-American.
Illinois, by contrast, is barely more than half native, and the scandals of its politics in regions where the alien vote is self-conscious, have long been manifest to every newspaper reader. With 329,000 Negroes, according to the 1930 census, Illinois ranks in this respect only after Pennsylvania and New York, among the Northern States; but corrupt political rings have made of the Negro an important factor in the government of Chicago, as he has not been in New York or Philadelphia.
Of its foreign-born stock, Nordics are far below a million, as compared with a million and a half of Alpines and a quarter of a million of Mediterraneans. Under the pressure of this competition, the old native stock has shown a strong tendency to move West and South. Texas and Arkansas, for example, have drawn more heavily from Illinois than they have from any other Northern State, and Illinois has also been the greatest single contributor to the development of the Pacific Coast.
Michigan is now just half native. Its geographical location has attracted more than half a million Canadians, many of them belonging to the French Alpine stock there. In the foreign stock as a whole, Alpines outnumber Nordics not far from two to one. Among the 100,000 Italians are many Northerners in the copper mines—big fellows so unlike the Sicilian and Neapolitan to whom the American on the Atlantic Coast is accustomed, that he does not recognize them as Italians. These northern Italians, as previously noted, are not Mediterraneans, but mostly Alpine with remnants of Nordic blood from the days of the Lombards and Goths.
Wisconsin has almost escaped the Negro invasion of the North, so its three million inhabitants are at least white; but the native stock is in a minority, due largely to the great German inrush of the last century. With this came many Scandinavians.
From 1860 to 1880 the immigrant nationalities ranked in the order—German, Norwegian, Dane, and Swede. The only difference since then is that they rank in the order—German, Norwegian, Swede, and Dane. The great Swedish tide of immigration in the last half of the nineteenth century did not acquire full force until the Norwegian had passed its crest.